The Trailer for Crime Drama 'The Gold' Recreates a Shocking Real Life Heist

These days, no matter what country you live in, it seems like we can't get enough stories of true crime. From grisly stories of murder to unhinged tales of scammers, we will absolutely watch them all, and all the better if they're based on real-life events that we aren't necessarily super familiar with. Most American audiences, for example, haven't heard about the gruesome crimes John Christie committed at Rillington Place and would be shocked to learn that John Stonehouse, a sitting member of Parliament, tried really hard to fake his own death in order to avoid jail back in the 1970s.  

The BBC is leaning hard into this trend with its upcoming star-studded prestige crime drama The Gold, which ticks all the necessary boxes—an improbable true story, a cast of colorful real-life figures, an impressively bold crime that actually broke records at the time it was committed—and looks great to boot. (Plus, that cast!)

The Gold is based on the story of the infamous Brink's-Mat robbery in 1983 and the decades-long fallout that followed. Described as "the crime of the century," the event involved six robbers who broke into the Brink's-Mat security warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport with a plan to steal  £3.2 million in cash. What they found was actually a stash of gold bullion, diamonds, and cash worth around £26m. (This was, not surprisingly, the largest robbery in world history at the time.)

But what's particularly remarkable about this crime is not only its scale but the legacy the robbery left behind. The attempt to dispose of the bullion after the heist basically caused the birth of large-scale international money laundering, provided the dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom, and left controversy and murder in its wake. Only two men were ever convicted of the crime, several other suspects died violently in the years that followed and most of the gold was never recovered. 

Probably the most amazing thing about The Gold is no one has really made a television series about this story before right now!

The synopsis is fairly straightforward.

Inspired by extensive research and interviews with some of those involved in the events, The Gold is a pulsating dramatization which takes a journey into a 1980s world awash with cheap money and loosened morals to tell this extraordinary and epic story for the first time in its entirety.

The cast of The Gold is absolutely stacked and includes such recognizable names as Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey), Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), Dominic Cooper (Spy City), Charlotte Spencer (Sanditon), Tom Cullen (Becoming Elizabeth), Emun Elliott (The Paradise), Sean Harris (The Green Knight), Ellora Torchia (Indian Summers), Stefanie Martini (Prime Suspect 1973), Daniel Ings (I Hate Suzie) and Peter Davison (Doctor Who). 

There's no premiere datee for The Gold on either side of the pond, but we do know that the drama will come to America by way of Paramount+, as part of the streamer's move into international production that includes shows such as the forthcoming projects Flatshare and A Gentleman in Moscow.